In light of the constant barrage of Russian airstrikes hitting the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made a plea with international allies to deliver urgently needed air defence systems.
"It is quite obvious that the air defense capabilities available to us in Ukraine are not enough, and this is obvious to all our partners as well," Zelensky said in his evening video message on Sunday.
"We are looking for opportunities to give Kharkiv greater air defense," he said, urging all Ukrainian diplomats and international negotiators to seek agreements for new supplies.
Zelensky has long been calling for additional US-made Patriot air defence systems and previously said in a TV interview that his country needed at least 25 of these systems to fend off Russian attacks.
Ukraine, fending off a large-scale Russian invasion for over two years now, has once again noticed an increased Russian military focus on Kharkiv, currently taking more fire than all other cities.
According to the local prosecutor's office, two aerial bombs struck Kharkiv at midday on Sunday, injuring five people, while also damaging 13 apartment blocks and other buildings. On Friday night, six people were killed and 11 injured.
Meanwhile Ukrainian forces have been targeting Russian sites with drone strikes, and Russian authorities on Sunday blamed Ukrainian forces for a drone attack that threatened the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, the largest in Europe.
The were no injuries or damage from the drone that detonated over the facility's sixth reactor, wrote the Russian management of the occupied plant in eastern Ukraine on Telegram.
However the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog, said the attack marked "serious incident with potential to undermine integrity of the reactor’s containment system."
Rafael Grossi, the body's chief, wrote on social media platform X that nuclear safety was not jeopardised and that this was the first time since November 2022 that the power plant had been directly hit.
"This must not happen," he wrote, saying that nobody stands to make military or political gains from attacks on nuclear facilities. The IAEA is permanently on site with a team of observers.
Radiation levels in and around the plant were in line with norms, Russian officials said.
According to other Russian reports, a drone had hit the canteen of the plant earlier on Sunday, damaging a lorry that was being unloaded. Russian officials have been complaining about increasing drone attacks on the plant and places the blame on Ukraine.
The six-reactor plant has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. Since then, the plant and power lines for cooling systems have been damaged multiple times during the course of hostilities, but no radiation leaks have been reported.
For safety reasons, the plant was put in a cold shutdown. But this does not eliminate the danger of an accident. The external electricity is needed to keep reactors cool and other essential safety operations running.
In a separate series of drone attacks, the Russian border region of Belgorod was attacked by Ukrainian combat drones in several waves on Sunday, the local governor said.
A girl sitting in a car with her family was killed by debris from a intercepted drone, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram. The father of the family, a teenager and two children in the car were also injured by the shrapnel, he said.
The drone crashed over the village of Shagarovka near the regional capital Belgorod.
The Defence Ministry in Moscow said that 12 drones had been intercepted over the Belgorod region and three drones over the neighbouring Bryansk region on Sunday afternoon.
The Belgorod region is a strategically important deployment area for the Russian army and is affected by fighting like no other region in Russia. But compared with the destruction wrought by Moscow across much of Ukraine, Belgorod had been comparatively unscathed.